


On Illness

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [147]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Cadre Bonding, Canon Compliant, Children, Fix-It, Flash Fiction, Gen, Growing up in the cadre system, Illness, POV First Person, Psi Corps, Telepath culture, Tumblr: b5drabblefic, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 05:48:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17360183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: An anecdote about when the cadre got "sick".The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	On Illness

**Author's Note:**

> New to _Behind the Gloves_? What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

When I was little, I didn't know that people got sick _individually_.

Nothing was "individual" in the cadres back then - all the little children ate, played and bathed together until we got to the 6-10 cadre house.

When one of us caught sick, we all did. And the teachers always taught us, "what hurts one hurts all," which we took very literally. Even though we hadn't developed telepathy yet, we would all start crying if one of us scraped a knee playing. When one child had to go to the nurse, even for a small bump or scrape, we'd cry until they came back.

We were all close like that. So when one boy developed lactose intolerance, we all pretended to have stomach pain, too. We weren't even "pretending," in the sense that we faking it... we just saw being sick as a collective thing.

We all rejected the cookies and milk, because _we can't eat that, it makes us sick_.

The teachers tried to explain, but we didn't understand. We could all eat certain foods except for one child? That was wrong, that was unnatural. And I know now that the teachers didn't have any say in what the cafeteria served, so they couldn't get different milk... so they just stopped serving whole milk to the entire cadre. We got cookies and juice instead.

As long as it was the same, we were fine. We were all "healthy" again.


End file.
